earthquake damage, there was more experimentation even in the cities with styles of building.
This process extended in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to a urban centers and the major irrigated rice bowls. The supporting poles grew shorter in the denser valley-floor settlements of the Bama, Thai, Minangkabau, and Tagalog. In the Philippines a hybrid style developed with a masonry lower floor and a light, wooden upper level. The onset of cement in the late nineteenth century encouraged bathrooms and kitchens to be built on the ground even in an otherwise elevated timber house.The Manila earthquakes of 1863 and 1880 damaged the lower portions even of houses built with unusual thickness, leading to a Filipino urban standard that supported the upper house wooden frame and used brickwork only as an outer shell
For most rural agriculturalists housing remained essentially impermanent well into the nineteenth century-easily built and easily rebuilt after fire, war natural disaster. Split-bamboo was preferred for walls, so that the laborious sawing of timber for planks was largely limited to boat builders and the fine palaces. The retreat of the forests with population pressure, however, made this pattern increasingly difficult to sustain in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the scattered populations of most areas in earlier times wood had no cost except the goodwill of neighbors to help cut and haul it for the house-posts. As dense settlements of irrigated rice and sugar spread in the nineteenth century, while shifting cultivators had to cut the secondary forest ever more frequently, good timber had to be bought. The central valley of Luzon and the islands of Panay and Negros were largely deforested by the ansion of sugar and tobacco by 1900. Gradually, therefore, the poor built and r to the ground and with flimsier fast-growing material such as bamboo the new corrugated iron or zinc roofing,
The twentieth century witnessed the first evidence of rat-borne plague in the Islands, with amajor epidemic in East Java in 1913-14 and periodic attacks thereafter. This induced the Dutch government to begin a radical rebuilding program, enforcing the replacement of rat-friendly bamboo and thatch with ized materials a tiled two million houses were built or modern in the Indies by 1940, giving Java villages their current neat model houses were also smoke-free with separate kitchens, though unfortunately this had the effect of driving overall mortality up as malaria-bearing mosquitos were able to invade the homes, Cement and zinc transformed housing of more affluent villagers a the century wore on
The rapidity of urbanization since the 1940s saw a deterioration of building standards, as access to affordable timber and bamboo declined and crowded makeshift slums developed in such giant cities as Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Saigon. The urban opportunities for education, informal sector employment and modern glamor outweighed the undoubted loss of housing comfort as th poor moved to the cities. For all their disproportionate share of national wealth. these hastily built coastal conurbations were vulnerable to floods, typhoons, earthquakes, and tsunamis, as if the lessons of earlier generations had been forgotten .The disasters came with unprecedented frequency and magnitude as the twenty-first century began (Chapter 18).